The Environmental Protection Agency, following the lead of the Obama Administration, has promulgated rules designed to shut down America's coal industry and force the U.S. economy to rely on unsustainable wind and solar energy for future power generation. Americans in the know realize this course of action will lead to energy shortages, brownouts and blackouts, higher energy prices, and more. Lawsuits seeking to curtail the EPA's power are pending in federal court -- and the plaintiffs point out that the EPA is violating its own rules and federal law in its quest for power.

Americans need to prepare for energy poverty unless the Obama - EPA juggernaut can be derailed and the so-called Clean Power Plan can be blocked or repealed. The courts in the past have ruled that the EPA overreached -- and surely that is what is happening here, but the people cannot rely solely on the courts (which soon could be controlled by radical leftists) and so need to rise up themselves and turn this underpowered train around.

The climate change crusades are heating up, thanks to an irascible President Obama, who sneers at polls showing Americans no longer believe in the hobgoblin view of carbon dioxide spread by politicians who arrogated science as a tool to be manipulated rather than a guide to rational behavior. CFACT advisor Larry Bell notes that the EPA’s regulatory war on coal rampage will impose major utility cost hikes, with disproportionate burdens falling upon economically disadvantaged residents of colder northern states. But who will pay the political price for this skullduggery?

If the U.S. continues on its current path, electricity rates are going to skyrocket (as President Obama promised) and there will be massive power outages because of the shutdown of coal- and natural gas-fired power plants. Energy poverty is America's future -- and we know this based on the German experience. There, because of the nation's high renewables requirements, electricity prices have already more than doubled -- and Germans are building new coal-fired power plants to address the intermittency of solar energy (which is often nonexistent in winter).

The radical Green push for colleges and universities to divest themselves from investment in fossil fuel companies is misguided, immoral, lethal, and, yes, racist. While Western civilization has seen an 11-fold increase in wealth, a doubling of lifespans, and health and prosperity unprecedented in human history, nearly 1.5 billion still live without the benefits of modern technology. While China (which will ignore the bigots) has linked nearly its entire population to the power grid, over 300 million in India and more than twice that number in sub-Saharan Africa lack even the simplest of modern amenities that electric power and motorized transportation afford. CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen asks, "What right do divestment activists and climate change alarmists have to deny Earth's most destitute people access to electricity and motor fuels, jobs, and better lives?"

The Obama Administration, through the corrupted Environmental Protection Agency, promised to kill the U.S. coal industry and they are already far along toward their goal. Along with it, they are wreaking havoc on the U.S. economy and threatening power outages of mammoth proportions. To justify this, they cite so-called scientific studies that are kept secret so that their findings cannot be easily challenged. But there's more -- other job-killing regulations also not backed by sound, peer reviewable science -- that will take the U.S. further away from long-term prosperity. Can this onslaught be stopped or even slowed down?

CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen says that the Obama Administration is continuing, even revving up, its campaign against domestic energy production with new EPA regulations on the horizon that would shutter much of the nation's coal industry and do great harm to oil and gas production; he also promised to veto any legislation to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. Moreover, the Obama progressive mentality is so pervaseive that international lending and donor agencies (the UN, OPIC, etc.) are holding poor, developing countries hostage to wind, solar, and biofuel projects that cannot lift them out of poverty -- and thus these elites are damning the world's poorest people to eternal poverty when true prosperity through fossil fuels is staring them in the face.

The United States is likely to see brownouts and blackouts thanks to the shuttering of coal-fired power plants (and who knows, maybe even gas-fired plants) that are part of an Obama Administration effort to depower the nation to satisfy environmental extremists and to satisfy his own desire to diminish the role of the United States in world affairs. The EPA is his tool of choice (along with other federal agencies whose policies rarely are blocked by either elected officials or the courts). And as the supply of electricity dwindles, the price of power will rise dramatically, with the greatest negative impacts on the poor, the elderly, and the disabled.

By Larry Bell|2014-12-09T10:52:26+00:00December 9th, 2014|Uncategorized|Comments Off on The EPA’s man-made cooling crisis

Included in the Obama Administration's "Unified Agenda" for 2015 are new, job-killing standards for ground-level ozone that are the product of a friendly lawsuit from the Sierra Club. These rules the President put on hold in 2011 in an effort to reduce “regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty, particularly as our economy continues to recover" -- or maybe for fear they would harm his reelection chances in 2012. The new regulations will mean that, depending on the final rule, 76% to 96% of the country—including some national parks where the natural background levels for ozone are 65 to 67 parts per billion—will be out of compliance. This will deal a crushing blow to U.S. economic recovery -- and the Sierra Club and the President know and heartily approve of this tragic outcome.

New Englanders are gambling with the weather, and they may soon be paying a heavy price -- both in dollars for heating their homes in very cold winter weather in 2014-15, and in loss of power due to brownouts or blackouts should even one remaining power plant experience any problems (or in the case of exceedingly high demand on a given day). The chief reason: Green enmity that shut down coal and nuclear power plants and has slowed construction of new natural gas fired power plants, together with the severe unreliability of wind and solar, especially in extreme weather conditions.

CFACT advisor Marita Noon suggests six major areas of confrontation and change now the the Republican Party controls both the House and Senate: the long-awaited (and perhaps too late) approval for the Keystone XL pipeline; a major expansion of oil and gas and minerals development on federal lands; lifting the current ban on U.S. oil and gas exports; reining in the EPA's power, especially as it applies to the proposed Clean Power Plan and the expanded Waters of the United States regulations; major reforms to the Endangered Species Act that would turn landowners from enemies to protectors of threatened and endangered species; and an end to climate alarmism as official U.S. Congress policy. Nearly all of these changes are expected to be vigorously fought by President Obama and the White House.

So the UN IPCC wants us to stop using fossil fuels entirely by 2100 -- whether or not we will need them. Alan Caruba recommends that everyone read Alex Epstein's great new book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. Epstein argues that we have used the power of fossil-fueled machines to build a durable civilization that is highly resilient to extreme heat, extreme cold, floods, storms, and so on” -- and that this demonstrates the foolishness of those who oppose their use.

Now that he no longer has to face the public, President Obama may soon unleash a torrent of radical executive orders with far-reaching consequences, but his regulatory bodies are advancing an all-out war on the U.S. oil and gas industry that can only be curtailed through Congressional action (at least for now). The chief problem is that the EPA's regulations constitute “s power without accountability — a useful formula politically but an abysmal one for policy-making." The REINS Act would end this shell game.”